These aren’t easy days for advocates of fairness and equity. During
the last twenty years, governments have overseen, promoted and sometimes
celebrated a significant redistribution of resources, jobs and life chances
that has consistently favoured some Australians and penalised others.
New investments in middle-class assets and advantages have not been matched
by compensating investments in the fortunes of less affluent citizens.
Policy-makers and politicians have dismantled some of the most significant
architecture promoting public health and public wealth, in the interests
of increasing competition and efficiency. They have done so with little
sense of long-term consequences, and with a shocking ignorance of history.
The architects of these changes will not pay the price of their short-sightedness,
though the people of the future will.

If you knew any history, you wouldn’t be reducing the stock of
public housing. Nor would you dismantle public dental services. You’d
have more regard for the preciousness—and fragility—of the
twentieth century’s victories in people’s health, literacy,
happiness and aspirations. And if you knew any history, you wouldn’t
be measuring the nation’s prospects by how comfortable you and
the powerful people like you feel. When you are at its pinnacle, and
enjoy all of its privileges, any society can look like the best one
imaginable. But if you want to know the importance of shelter, health
and work, listen to the unhoused, the unwell and the unemployed. They
know best what is going wrong, and how to put it right.

Australia is less fair than it was. There’s less money for social
mobility, and more for privilege preservation. If you wish to do well
in this country, it is more and more important to choose your parents
carefully. The poor haven’t got poorer, but they are a lot further
behind the rich than they used to be. The schools and hospitals that
cater to them are more dilapidated, and their welfare comes with a revitalised
suspicion and meanness of spirit. In place of arguments for shared responsibility
comes a war on the largely invented problem of ‘welfare fraud’ that
should forever shame its instigators and enthusiasts. Citizens are encouraged
to believe that governments can’t look after them, that everyone
has an agenda, that every argument for change or continuity is just spin
and that they must look after themselves and their own.

If there are no losers, there
are no victors.

At times, you fear the faintness of arguments that might draw those
citizens to different conclusions. Too few talk about the good of the
whole, or notice that because very few of us have the means to guard
against the frailties we share, we must pool resources to protect and
nourish each other. As some powerful and privileged people retreat from
the responsibilities that come from sharing a society, they console themselves
with the fiction that everyone else is playing the same game. But it’s
a game that most people can’t be allowed to win, because exclusion
and exclusiveness are part of the reward. If there are no losers, there
are no victors.

And who is asking the crucial questions about a society in which more
of life’s rewards will flow from the competitive struggle for jobs
and resources and wealth? What happens to the young, for example? Who
protects the weak? What are the moral and collective responsibilities
of people who are advantaged by talent and skill? What are the obligations
of those whose wealth and security accrues largely from the luck of inheritance
or timing? What do we do with people who aren’t very capable, or
who aren’t even interested in doing the things for which we are
prepared to pay a decent income, or whose vocation perhaps lies in caring
for children and the elderly or being a good parent? Most of all, perhaps,
what happens to the losers?

These failures of imagination and fairness lie nearer the top than the
bottom of Australian society. If there’s a crisis, it is not a
crisis of welfare dependency or inefficiency or alienation. It’s
a crisis of compassion. It’s a crisis of obligation, from the lucky
to the unlucky, the old to the young, the insider to the outsider, those
rich in confidence and chances to those who despair of either.

It might all seem very bleak. For an historian like me, it is less bleak,
because the lessons of history concern not inevitable or inexorable outcomes,
but the certainty of change and the possibility of forging all kinds
of futures. For the fair-minded Australian, two recent books might help
further to restore some sense of possibility. One, Hugh Stretton’s Australia
Fair, begins with a humane and straightforward injunction—that
we should, as far as is possible, leave the world fairer and more equal
than we found it—and shows how practical policies might help us
achieve that end. The other, Peter Saunders’ The Poverty Wars,
attempts to break the debate over poverty out of the number-crunching
slough into which it had fallen, by restoring to the conversation a humane
concern for the actual sufferings of the poor. Both are important for
their ideas and arguments, as well as for the lucid, clear and careful
way they develop their ideas and arguments. Both avoid the postured shouting
at largely invented foes that has come to characterise some forms of
public debate in Australia. They are impassioned but not inflammatory.
They argue from evidence rather than taking opportunistic pot shots from
fixed and unmovable positions. They offer ideas and practical suggestions
and take seriously those alternative arguments that have been advanced
in similarly good faith.

If there’s a crisis, it
is not a crisis of welfare dependency or inefficiency or
alienation.

Both of these books are sensible and judicious. They appeal to citizens’ best
instincts, and their appetite for careful and reasonable arguments. Both
pursue a form of scholarship in which the public is trusted with ideas
and conclusions. Saunders, for instance, assumes his readers will want
to properly understand poverty before making decisions about how it might
best be tackled. Proper understanding comes from listening, especially
to the people who live with poverty’s consequences, so he devotes
much of his book to a calm demonstration of what is learned from listening
and how those insights might inform academic and policy debates.

It is particularly important, for example, to recognise that income-based
snapshots, while useful for some purposes, do not capture very well the
events, causes and ill-fortunes that created most people’s poverty
in the first place. Because they can’t trace poverty over time,
they tend to mask the accumulating nature of people’s disadvantage,
and the ways in which seemingly small mishaps can become major disasters
for those who live close to the edge. Accordingly, policies to address
poverty will be greatly improved if they can identify those common triggers.
They will be even more effective if they can sort out the difference
between poverty’s symptoms, which might include despair, isolation,
alienation and a feeling of helplessness, and poverty’s causes,
which are—unsurprisingly for an historian—mostly to do with
unemployment, illness and a lack of money.

Hugh Stretton is angry and disappointed, especially by the failures
of the major political parties. The first chapter of his book is a stinging
rebuke of those who have promised us ‘new freedoms’, and
promoted ‘necessary adjustments’ to supposedly ‘inevitable
changes’. He is dismayed by their lack of imagination, by their
ideological straitjackets, and by the ease with which they allowed the
scourge of mass unemployment to resurface in a rich society. Yet his
main intention is to show us how to proceed and what to do next. He knows
that fairness and justice need explaining, not just defending. Readers
want ideas and directions. Accordingly, Stretton’s main concern
is with the principles and purposes that might better meet the challenges
of the future, and meet them in a way that reduces rather than exacerbates
inequalities. In chapters on housing, superannuation, work, child care,
natural resources and economic policy, he canvasses a range of ideas,
drawing in equal measure upon good academic work in the social sciences,
good management principles, and his own experience and expertise in public
administration. They should be read, examined, debated and discussed
by anyone interested in the future we want to make.

Both of these authors also refuse over-simplification. They don’t
deny that policy is often formed from a dilemma, which is almost always
a clash between two potentially good things. They recognise the importance
of political judgement and balance. They also acknowledge the significance
of leadership, well-designed institutions and good governance. As Stretton
argues in Australia Fair, the answers to many of the most intractable
and difficult problems of the present, as well as the challenges of the
futures, lies not in less government but in better government. Those
answers will also sometimes mean increasing taxes, something for which,
as Stretton shows, solid majorities of polled citizens show a consistent
preference if the alternative is continued declines in the quality, accessibility
and equitable delivery of public services. It is always important to
ask who doesn’t want to pay taxes; I suspect the general rule is
that the less effort involved in a fortune’s making, the more fervent
the denial of anyone else’s right to a share of it. As Stretton
says, ‘most taxes do some good and some harm’ (p. 249); his
scheme for taxing and spending strikes a reasonable balance, and makes
even more sense when read alongside his ideas for a sensible approach
to superannuation and the funding of increased longevity. It’s
a matter of choices. Good public regulation produces a better environment
for private enterprise. If you wish to nourish and nurture the young,
then the middle-aged and the old will have to help pay for it. If you
wish to help the poor you will need some sensible restraints upon the
rich.

If you wish to help the poor
you will need some sensible restraints upon the rich.

In the face of profound changes and challenges, we need practical programs
and suggestions. What are we going to do, for instance, about increasing
longevity, as well as the increasing time young people spend in education?
Both are good things, if we want more and healthier grandparents spoiling
grandchildren, and more talented and skilled young adults moving in and
changing the way we do science, or manage our technological needs or
create great art and performance. But both create dilemmas in policy
and funding.

Then there is work: do we really want about 10 per cent of our population
to live in a state of perpetual un- and under-employment? Wouldn’t
it be better to spend more money creating jobs, and less money exhorting
the unemployed to look for jobs that don’t exist, policing their
compliance with rules and procedures most people would find impossible
to follow, and then punishing them for small infractions?

What about housing? There is great wealth, satisfaction and security
in our housing stock, and owner-occupation has been a distinctively Australian
means of equalising wealth. But one of the effects of better health care
is an increasing life span. Fewer people now die at the time when it
was common to transfer wealth to the next generation; in celebrating
longevity, we need to take some account of how to handle its consequences
for the housing choices of people born after 1970. Why not, as Stretton
suggests, try a publicly-financed adventure in price-restrained, rental-purchase,
rental and good quality public housing, in which younger and poorer people
can choose to trade some of their later capital gains for lower interest
rates now?

Or why not, as Saunders suggests, mount a war on poverty, with the intention
of winning it, rather than engaging in a war about poverty’s measurement
and extent?

From both of these books, it is possible to draw one strong and confident
conclusion. We need to explore paths into the future, mindful of the
lessons and insights we can draw from the past. But we also need a sense
of adventure. As Stretton says, ‘such adventures have to be well-led,
technically competent, and democratically desired’. In my view,
he is absolutely correct to add that ‘it’s the first two
of those that most need repair’ (p. 30). Like Hugh Stretton and
Peter Saunders, I think there is an appetite for ideas and arguments.
It is not naïve to suggest that persistent and powerful notions of fairness
still animate a solid majority of citizens in this country.

I live in a still raw new housing estate on Melbourne’s south-eastern
edge. My neighbours, like me, are partly focused on their mortgages and
their material aspirations because that’s the way the world is.
Like me, many are migrants or the children of migrants. I think most
of them, like me, grew up in Labor-voting households. But on the evidence
of the local ballot box, a good two-thirds of my neighbourhood voted
for the conservatives in the last federal election. An even greater majority
seem convinced that their votes and especially their views have little
meaning, and that all the political system offers them is point-scoring,
pot shots and more or less obvious lies. In that context, I think they
probably voted for the devil they knew.

From both of these books, it
is possible to draw one strong and confident conclusion.

Are my neighbours lost to ideas and debates about their future? Would
they listen to arguments about whether it is easier to create security
and safety in splendid isolation, or to do so by sharing the costs and
the benefits? Might they respond to a housing plan that would ensure
their children have as good a chance of owning a home as they did? Or
recognise that because there are vulnerabilities everyone shares, it
is sensible to invest in cheaper collective defences rather than extremely
costly private ones? Would they agree that poverty is best seen as a
kind of disaster, for which our first question shouldn’t be ‘what
did you do to bring this upon yourself’ but ‘how we can help,
and ensure that this doesn’t happen again’?

It’s hard to know for sure, but in part that’s because few
have really tried. As Stretton suggests, if Labor thinks it is going
to lose the 2007 election, why not lose it ‘with an up-to-date
program of full employment and other blessings’ (p. 285)? Perhaps
there would be a massive rejection, a horrible scare campaign, a signal
of terrible public alienation. We would end up feeling worse than we
do now. But what if Labor won or even got close on the basis of such
a platform? And there are other clues. On page thirteen of its April
23, 2004 edition, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun reported the results
of an ‘Eye on Australia’ survey. More respondents chose the
gap between rich and poor (83 per cent) and the high cost of housing
(78 per cent) as major national challenges than either personal safety
(64 per cent) or terrorism (58 per cent). In the same survey, when asked
what Australia should try to become, 93 per cent said ‘more inventive’,
92 per cent said ‘more caring’, 90 per cent said ‘fairer’ and
87 per cent said ‘kinder’; 75 per cent wanted it to be ‘more
able to defend itself’. I’m not a party strategist. But,
to me, that looks a little bit like a potential political constituency.

When the people of the future come to write the histories of the early
21st century, they will note the discussions of increasing inequality
and the evidence of division and they will ask: who stood and spoke against
this? Who offered hope and solutions, and who offered only escape and
denial and indignation? I hope that both of these scholars, and both
of these works, will serve as proof of the power of hope and the power
of well-reasoned arguments to move hearts and minds. In any event, I
know that they will both stand as testimony to the resilience of an argument
for a fairer, kinder and more adventurous Australia.

Mark Peel is an historian and works at Monash University; his most
recent book was The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty (Cambridge
University Press, 2003).